Another Remembered Present

Intuition tells us that perceptual experience—the seamless flow of conscious images of vision, sound, touch, and so forth—reflects the external world. Accordingly, information flow along the brain’s sensory pathways has been thought to follow a caudo-rostral direction, away from the ports of entry, toward integrative cortices in the anterior parts of the frontal and temporal lobes. However, this view of a unidirectional, “bottom-up” processing cascade is challenged by findings which suggest that there is also information transfer in the opposite, “top-down” direction, from association areas toward early sensory cortices. A particularly intriguing observation is that while the initial bottom-up activation sweep along the sensory pathways can accomplish stimulus processing of considerable complexity and yield certain automated behaviors, conscious awareness of a sensory object appears to depend on top-down signals (1–3), as observed in the visual (4), auditory (5), and somatosensory (6) systems. Why is this the case?

In my model of bottom up organization, self-engineered genetically predisposed intracellular interactions depend on chemical input from the environment, which activates existing intracellular interactions from the top down. The chemical input is associated with nutrition (food odors) and self/non-self recognition (social odors/pheromones) from microbes to man.

In this model, if olfactory/pheromonal input is responsible for the consciousness we do not attribute to other organisms, it would nevertheless be an evolved genetically predisposed attribution predicted by animal models of sensory stimuli and their unconscious affects. Of course the two essential unconscious affects are chemically associated with nutrition and reproduction because evolution could not have occurred if the unconscious affects of chemical stimuli did not lead to the proper choices.

Thus, the answer to the question of “Why would the conscious mind be grounded in dispositional records held in CDZs, rather than the “raw” version of reality initially established in the early sensory cortices through bottom-up signals from the thalamus?” is contained within the olfactory/pheromonal model. And Kasper Meyer nearly answered the question. “The brain “constantly and internally [generates] varieties of hypotheses and [tests] them upon the outside world, instead of having the environment impose (instruct) solutions directly upon the internal structure of the brain” because the plasticity of responses has been established along an evolutionary continuum that did not require consciousness or the thalamus for proper choice. But now that we can think about the choices we make, we think that consciousness is something other than what is required for food acquisition and reproduction in other species.

In my model, consciousness is an evolved function of how sensory input from the environment directly effects the mammalian gene, cell, tissue, organ, organ system pathway that links the input to the diversity of behaviors across species and within species (e.g., the behaviors linked directly to food choice and mate choice by olfactory/pheromonal input).

James Vaughn Kohl was the first to accurately conceptualize human pheromones, and began presenting his findings to the scientific community in 1992. He continues to present to, and publish for, diverse scientific and lay audiences, while constantly monitoring the scientific presses for new information that is relevant to the development of his initial and ongoing conceptualization of human pheromones.
Recently, Kohl integrated scientific evidence that pinpoints the evolved neurophysiological mechanism that links olfactory/pheromonal input to genes in hormone-secreting cells of tissue in a specific area of the brain that is primarily involved in the sensory integration of olfactory and visual input, and in the development of human sexual preferences. His award-winning 2007 article/book chapter on multisensory integration: The Mind’s Eyes: Human pheromones, neuroscience, and male sexual preferences followed an award winning 2001 publication: Human pheromones: integrating neuroendocrinology and ethology, which was coauthored by disinguished researchers from Vienna. Rarely do researchers win awards in multiple disciplines, but Kohl’s 2001 award was for neuroscience, and his 2007 “Reiss Theory” award was for social science.
Kohl has worked as a medical laboratory scientist since 1974, and he has devoted more than twenty-five years to researching the relationship between the sense of smell and the development of human sexual preferences. Unlike many researchers who work with non-human subjects, medical laboratory scientists use the latest technology from many scientific disciplines to perform a variety of specialized diagnostic medical testing on people.
James V. Kohl is certified with:
* American Society for Clinical Pathology
* American Medical Technologists
James V. Kohl is a member of:
* Society for Neuroscience
* Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology
* Association for Chemoreception Sciences
* Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality
* International Society for Human Ethology
* American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science
* Mensa, the international high IQ society

About James V. Kohl

James V. Kohl was the first to accurately conceptualize human pheromones, and began presenting his findings to the scientific community in 1992. He continues to present to, and publish for, diverse scientific and lay audiences, while constantly monitoring the scientific presses for new information that is relevant to the development of his initial and ongoing conceptualization of human pheromones.